Review
Wikipedia Explorer is a Wikipedia client for Windows. The installation process is a little bit complicated, but once you install all the .NET frameworks needed, the application runs really good. This client connects to wikipedia.org and can retrieve any article published therein. The graphical user interface is pretty simple. There is one big field where you can read the article and see a search field. When you search for something, the most popular suggestions will show up, and you can pick one of them. Once the article is opened, there are two ways of reading it. You can do it the usual way or you can choose to activate the map mode. The map mode will show links to every hypertext element within the text. I tried it with the article Project Manhattan, which showed links to Politics, War, World War II, weapons, etc. That is a great way of finding interesting and related subjects to read upon. The reader mode is basic but the text is laid out well enough for you to read. I have found that Wikipedia Explorer tends to be slow to find articles and open them, but now I know that the reason for this is that the application caches every article that you open, so that you can open it when you are offline. I read from Wikipedia a lot, and being able to take articles of it with me wherever I go is a really nice feature. |
